Make a Chess Board out of Legos

I’m a sucker for Lego projects. It’s fun to take these blocks to different places beyond the purchased kit or the basic things your kids might come up with to build on their own.

I’m blown away by this Lego chess set from Teach Beside Me. Such a brilliant use of black and white blocks.

Building it is a great STEM challenge (even little kids can do the pattern making involved in making the board), and of course playing chess is a great learning activity because you have to be able to remember the rules for the different pieces, use strategy, take turns, pay attention, etc.

(I don’t actually remember how to play chess, but Chess Kid looks like a good place to start for kids and adults who need a refresher.)

I’m guessing you could make it a checkerboard, too, using the little single round pieces as your checkers.

Do you play chess with your kids? I’d love to know at what age you started and how it went.

[Photo via Teach Beside Me.]

Check out this Brick Subscription box, Building kits delivered to your door each month.

A great gift idea for little Lego building engineers.

With little kids especially, linking learning to physical activity really does help them learn. Movement can help kids focus, and it just keeps them from sitting still all day, which isn’t good for anyone.

The good news is lots of different learning activities can be adopted to get kids moving while they learn, so let’s look at some math and number activities that use gross motor skills.

Probably the most obvious thing would be hopscotch, which helps kids count while they hop. You can also mix up the numbers, do skip counting with the numbers, give kids a simple math problem and have them hop to the correct answer, and on and on.

This number hop game from Gift of Curiosity is a more chaotic version, with number flash cards on the floor that kids can hop, skip or jump to as you call them out (this one is more for individual number identification than counting). It’s a great indoor option if it’s too hot, cold or rainy out to do traditional hopscotch, too.

This painter’s tape number line idea from Days with Grey doesn’t involve quite as much movement, but kids can move around while they place things on the number line and work on learning about one to one correspondence. In the blog post they use shoes, but you can count anything you’ve got handy. (Be warned when I visited this website had an ad that continually took up the whole page, but you can get the idea pretty quickly.)

One of the important tasks of learning numbers is learning a parent’s phone number just in case it’s ever needed, or how to dial 911 in case on an emergency. Teaching Mama has a great way to practice telephone numbers and get some movement in with a giant telephone keypad made out of paper plates. You can also use this for counting practice, but it’s a great idea for learning phone numbers, too.

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